research advances
December 2009 news
Spotlight on Structural Genomics
PSI-SGKB [doi:10.1038/nw_psisgkb.2009.57]
This column presents news and announcements related to the structural genomics efforts.
Keystone Symposium to focus on structural genomics
The structural biology and structural genomics community are invited to attend the Keystone Symposia conference: Structural Genomics: Expanding the Horizons of Structural Biology, to be held 8–13 January, 2010 in Breckenridge, Colorado, USA. Organized by members of the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI), the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and other worldwide structural genomics efforts, the goal of the meeting is to explore how we can best harness the current approaches from high-throughput structural genomics to tackle present and future challenges in structural biology and how we can directly apply these methods to topical and important problems in structural, molecular, cellular and chemical biology.
This four-day symposium will be held jointly with the 'Structural Biology' symposium, and will include plenary sessions and workshops such as 'Exploiting Structure for Function', 'Advances in Methodologies and Tools for Structural Biology', and 'Pushing the Limits: Advances in Challenging Systems'.
It is not too late to register — visit the Meeting Website for more information.
“iSee” you! — Special online collection highlights SGC articles with interactive graphics
In its 20 October 2009 issue the open-access journal PLoS ONE treated readers to a collection of graphically enhanced articles written by the Structural Genomics Consortium. This collection, entitled 'Structural Biology and Human Health: Medically Relevant Proteins from the SGC', combined each structural article with a new molecular viewer, iSee, developed by software development company MolSoft in collaboration with the SGC.
Instead of the static 2D images readers usually find in structure articles, the authors created animated, annotated views of the protein structure that can be explored using a free web browser plug-in. Tags in the article also change the view to highlight the particular point under discussion. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, an interactive 3D image is worth considerably more,” says Wen Hwa Lee, senior scientist in research informatics at the SGC. The SGC has also created iSee 'datapacks' for more than 500 of their structures for easy visualization and future publications.
The SGC is a public–private partnership based at the University of Oxford, UK, the University of Toronto, Canada, and the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, with a focus on determining the 3D structures of human proteins of medical relevance that could be targets for new drugs. The SGC is funded by 13 government and industry agencies. MolSoft, in La Jolla, California, develops tools in the area of structure prediction, structural proteomics, cheminformatics, and molecular visualization and animation. iSee uses activeICM plug-in technology developed by MolSoft.
PSI Resource Centers to present tutorial at ASCB meeting
Interested in learning how the Structural Genomics Knowledgebase and the PSI Material Repository can jump-start your research? At the American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting, representatives from these two PSI resource centers will be giving a tutorial on how to use their websites to efficiently find information and materials that will help you hit the ground running with your projects. The 60-minute presentation (Exhibitor Tutorial F) will be held on 7 December 2009 at 5:45 pm in Room 25A. See the ACSB meeting program for details.
For the past 10 years, the PSI has developed new technologies, solved more than 4,000 protein structures, and leveraged many computational models to expand our knowledge of protein space. The Structural Genomics Knowledgebase (this site) and the PSI Material Repository (http://psimr.asu.edu) provide central access to all the structural and experimental results of the PSI's high-throughput efforts. The PSI is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
Coming to a conference near you
Want to learn more about the Structural Genomics Knowledgebase? Representatives will be available at these upcoming meetings.
American Society for Cell Biology Annual Meeting
Booth #730 and Tutorial F (see program for details)
5–9 December 2009
San Diego, California, USA
Keystone Symposium — Structural Genomics: Expanding the Horizons of Structural Biology
8–13 January 2010
Breckenridge, Colorado, USA
Annual Biophysical Society Meeting
20–24 February 2010
San Francisco, California, USA
